A Fulbrighter's Love Affair with Old-Town Vilnius

Vilnius has long been a cosmopolitan city with many cultures
and ethnicities, and the Old-Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since
I was teaching at the University there, it made sense for us to live in the
center of Old-Town Vilnius, but our location offered much more than
convenience.The energetic mish-mash of
cultures, shops, entertainment, and dining experiences there was unique and
unforgettable.With every day that
passed, our street, Totoriu Gatve, named in reference to the fact that it was,
long ago, the Tatar quarter of the city (just as Vokieciu Gatve means “German
Street” for the same reason) fascinated
me more and more. Across the street from our flat was an antique shop, run by
an antique lady who lived in the flat above it and featured lace curtains in
all her windows, each of a different pattern.

Directly next to her lies the Transylvania, a pub which advertises +Guinness GB and seemed to be very popular with
motorcyclists and British tourists. My husband still claims that you haven't
lived until you've seen a tipsy Brit singing Diana Ross's "Stop in the
Name of Love" to a passing Taxi in Lithuania. When the Scots were in town
for the Lithuania/Scotland football match, we heard a lot of "Auld Lang
Syne" coming from there, and our street was flooded by men in kilts. The
pub and the antique shop seemed to exist in a semi-armed detente, in which the
proprietor of the shop shook her head and clicked her tongue out the window,
and the motorcyclists made their bikes backfire in response.

Directly beneath our flat, symbolically enough, was a translation bureau, and
further along the street a travel agency, hair and nail salon, juice stop, and
Cuban cocktail bar. Yes, Cuban. All of
which, of course, had flats above them, on the second and third floors. Some
had lovely wrought iron balconies, and flags flying. I passed a Swedish flag
each day walking to our local grocery every day. Totoriu Gatve also proudly hosts the hottest tattoo parlor and body piercing establishment in Lithuania, according to the
guidebooks.

Then there were the ubiquitous stocking shops--there was one on almost
every street, it seemed. The Lithuanian ladies have made a virtue of the
necessity of dressing for the cold, and there were multiple shops with nothing
in the windows but disembodied pairs of legs, displaying every color and
texture of tight imaginable: faux-tweed,green fishnet, orange lace, or a nice purple paisley tight to peek out
of your boots. As I wrote in my journal one morning, I watched a woman walk by
sporting a pair of pale blue geometrically-patterned legs. For those whose purse doesn’t run to a
high-end shop (or whose nerve doesn’t extend to purple paisley legs), there was
a great used-clothing store a few blocks away where I could meet the practical
needs of two kids who would tear the knees out of their pants jumping around
the cobblestoned streets or riding scooters around the Cathedral Square, as
well as a husband who really didn’t expect it could get that cold.

The variety of
available restaurants was unexpected as well. My children’s favorite Old-Town
restaurant served traditional Lithuanian food, but I think it was the live
animals that won them over as much as the bread. Waiting for dinner, they could
go see the snakes (in a huge terrarium), the Polish chickens, the fish, some
sort of a shark-looking thing, and statuary that reminded one of the era when
children’s stories were written by the Brothers Grimm.

There were a dozen life-size statues of
wolves (with blood dripping from their mouths) in the banquet room, a one-armed
gnome, a bunny statue in a giant brick oven (my son just informed me that once
there was a penguin in there as well), chicken footprints on the wall leading
to the bathrooms, and curious wooden puppets hanging from the real, live tree
growing in the center of the place. Perhaps in keeping with the name of our
area, my husband found a Turkish place nearby where he made a regular Lavash
run each week. He and the Turkish owner soon discovered that they could
converse in German, her English and his Lithuanian being equally limited.
There’s an interesting story behind that restaurant, as well as all the others,
I’ll bet.

But the restaurants, bars, tattoo parlors, and boutiques
don’t even begin to cover the many ways to enjoy Old-Town Culture. Most of the
beautiful old, restored, or half-restored churches hosted symphonic, choral, or
chamber music concerts regularly while we were there.My husband, walking in the evenings, would
hear music in the streets outside the churches and then drop in to at least one
performance each week, and I will never forget the beautiful Christmas concert
the Lutheran Youth Chorale gave in the Old-Town Lutheran church we attended
weekly.

Then there was the opera and ballet. I know that I will most
likely never again live half a dozen streets away from an Opera House, nor will
I ever again be able to see an opera or ballet for the price of a movie in
America (well, maybe a movie with popcorn). The Lietuvos Nacionalinis Teatras is
very active and very well attended by the people here. Lithuanians love music
and dance and work very hard to excel at it. The opera was lovely, the ballet
classic and so enjoyable that I was tempted to do something I have never done
in my life: get autographs. Ok, just kidding. But my level of awe was nearly
that high, partially because of the pace and variety of the offerings at the
opera house. When I think of the work the artists must have put in to maintain
their schedules and execute the choreography night after night, I am still
amazed. There were performances of three to five different operas or ballets at
the theater each week (which would constitute an entire season’s worth of
shows for a single company in America), three weeks a month, and every
performance I attended was sold out. I saw many moms on "dates" with
their teenage daughters at the ballet, and children all dressed up in their
fancy clothes to see Don Quixote. There was one dancer in the chorus of that
show (playing a matador and, later, a gypsy) who I am sure was close to 60, still
amazingly agile and strong. I wondered if he used to be the male lead when he
was younger. I hope he was still dancing for the love of it, and not only for
financial reasons. Other dancers looked to be in their 40s (row 7 was my
favorite in the theater--you can really see everything), and their dancing
didn't show it any more than his did. I saved the best ballet for last during
my time in Vilnius: Swan Lake. It was magnificent; you become even more
involved when you are seeing a ballet to which you already know all the music
by heart. And little Mikki (the Japanese Prima-Ballerina of the company at the
time—by the end of my stay I had finally taken the cue of my Lithuanian friends
and students and begun referring to the
dancers and opera singers by their first names) was a lovely swan. She was
always very birdlike, so the role suited her perfectly. But I think my favorite
part was the corps de ballet choral work. The unison was as good as I’ve ever seen: so many
dancers in motion, each creating not only an individual but a corporate effect,
every step a tiny piece of an exquisite pattern that filled the stage.

Walking home at night after the ballet, I often did the grocery shopping for
the following day—combining the transcendent and the mundane that made the
balance of my life in Old Town. Since my family was with me, and we had a
miniature European-style fridge in our flat, it took an almost daily trip to the
tiny local shop to keep everyone fed. But if it had been just me in living in
Old Town Vilnius, I'd probably have blown all the grocery money on stockings,
opera, and ballet.

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